Glossary / Cyber Insurance
Cyber Insurance
An insurance policy covering financial losses from a cyber incident — breach response costs, business interruption, sometimes extortion payments — increasingly conditioned on specific security controls actually being in place, not just purchased on paper.
A typical policy covers incident-response costs, legal and notification obligations, and business-interruption losses, with certain scenarios — some nation-state attacks, or a vulnerability the policyholder knowingly left unpatched — often excluded or sublimited. Reading what's actually excluded matters as much as what's covered.
Underwriting shifted meaningfully after a wave of ransomware payouts: insurers that once wrote policies off a simple checkbox questionnaire now typically require evidence of baseline controls — MFA everywhere, EDR deployed, a real patch cadence, tested backups — before binding or renewing a policy, and a misrepresented answer on the application can void a claim after the fact, not just raise the premium.
For an MSP's clients, this is where several compliance frameworks converge in a very concrete way: cyber-insurance application questions map closely to NIST CSF and CIS Controls language, so an MSP that can answer with evidence rather than a guess tends to speed up — and sometimes reduce the cost of — a renewal.
How Nexus handles this
Nexus's compliance module tracks posture against NIST CSF and CIS Controls specifically because those are the frameworks most cyber-insurance applications borrow their language from — evidence attached per control instead of a best-guess answer on a renewal application.
More terms
MSP (Managed Service Provider)
A company that remotely manages a client's IT infrastructure and end-user systems on an ongoing, proactive basis — usually a flat-fee contract, not break-fix billing.
RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management)
Software that lets an MSP monitor device health and perform remote management tasks — patching, scripting, remote control — across every client site from one console.
PSA (Professional Services Automation)
Software that runs the business side of MSP operations — ticketing, SLAs, billing, contracts, and client records — the system of record most MSP work flows through.
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